August
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.243 Tuesday, 29 August 2017
From: Michael Luskin <
Date: August 27, 2017 at 10:06:38 AM EDT
Subject: Poetry
From Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/opinion/sunday/memorize-poems-poetry-education.html?mcubz=3
Memorize That Poem!
Molly Worthen
AUG. 26, 2017
LATE one night this spring, Justin Snider, an assistant dean at Columbia University, was riding the uptown No. 2 in Manhattan when the train ground to a halt. After about 15 minutes — with little information about the delay and no cell service — everyone in the car was getting restless. Suddenly, inspiration struck. “I asked neighboring passengers if they wanted to hear some Shakespeare, and no one objected,” Mr. Snider told me.
He had memorized Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech more than 15 years earlier, to pass the time on a cross-country bike trip. “I was definitely nervous because I’d never performed publicly before,” he said. Although his jaded audience neglected to clap when he finished — they did applaud when the train started to move again — Mr. Snider was pleased that he didn’t forget a line.
The soliloquy was fixed in the architecture of his brain, ready to serve in a moment of boredom or underground anxiety. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Snider has asked students to memorize poetry many times in his career in education.
Since ancient times, humans have memorized and recited poetry. Before the invention of writing, the only way to possess a poem was to memorize it. Long after scrolls and folios supplemented our brains, court poets, priests and wandering bards recited poetry in order to entertain and connect with the divine. For individuals, a poem learned by heart could be a lifeline — to grapple with overwhelming emotion or preserve sanity amid the brutalities of prison and warfare.
Yet poetry memorization has become deeply unfashionable, an outmoded practice that many teachers and parents — not to mention students — consider too boring, mindless and just plain difficult for the modern classroom. Besides, who needs to memorize when our smartphones can instantly call up nearly any published poem in the universe?
[ . . . ]
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.242 Tuesday, 29 August 2017
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: August 27, 2017 at 11:44:53 AM EDT
Subject: From TLS – RSC Titus Andronicus
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/titus-andronicus-blanche-mcintyre/
From TLS July 12, 2017
As flies to wanton boys
EMMA SMITH
TITUS ADRONICUS
RSC, Stratford-upon-avon, until September 2
Notices in the Courtyard Theatre for Blanche McIntyre’s production warn audiences that “Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, contains smoke effects, gunshots, bad language, sexual content, with violent and distressing scenes”. As advisory statements go, this one is oddly poised: part morally responsible disclaimer, part voyeuristic tease, a boast disguised as a trigger warning. In recent years, Titus Andronicus’s critical reception has gone from shock to schlock. Those stylized red streamers symbolizing Lavinia’s injuries in Peter Brook’s 1955 production belong to a very different time. Now Titus’s claims on twenty-first-century attention are its multiple casualties and those infamous human pies, a cheerfully dehumanized relish for the play’s gore that evades the important question: why? Not why do people do terrible things, because Shakespeare is habitually more interested in the consequences than the causes of human actions. Rather, the play goads us: why do we pay money to watch depravity and call it entertainment? This production certainly ticks a number of Roman-tragedy-in-2017 boxes. Unhinged leader of free world wearing trademark blue suit? Check. Sean Spicer cameo at a press conference podium? Check. Fears of populism and the unsettling power of the ballot box? Check. But while no one expects Shakespeare’s plays to give us answers for our world, we might expect self-consciously contemporary productions to help frame the questions. Although this production is energetic, detailed and often visually original, it is blankly and troublingly incurious about its own central, sadistic premiss.
What McIntyre does distil from Shakespeare’s tragedy is its clear-eyed investigation of male solipsism. When Lavinia (Hannah Morrish), a trembling broken bundle of bloodied rags held together by her knickers and trousers still binding her ankles, encounters her family, we see three men withdraw from her into their own egotistical grief. Titus (David Troughton), Marcus (Patrick Drury) and Lucius (Tom McCall) each turn their back, trapped in self-pity. Titus spends much of the play on the ground, wailing about the grief he feels at the terrible sufferings of others: it his hard on his battle-stiffened knees to get up again. He is eager to lose his own hand less because it might actually free his sons, than because it allows him fuller access to the play’s vicarious anguish. Chiron (Luke MacGregor) and Demetrius’s (Sean Hart) ominous use of classical mythology to preinscribe female victimhood is echoed by the production’s decision to have Lavinia embrace her own murder by Titus. Dressed like a demure Edwardian maid at the monstrous concluding banquet, Lavinia hugs her father in a silent pact, allowing the production to recalibrate male selfishness as mercy-killing, sanctioned by the example of “rash Virginius”. Elsewhere, the play’s own assumptions go unchallenged. Tamora (Nia Gwynne), supervising the lusts of her pasty sons in between dallying with Aaron, and haloed in red like a Disney witch on the steps at the start of the second half, is indeed a “ravenous tiger”. Nor does the production do much to interrogate or reframe the play’s repeated racial slurs on Aaron the Moor, and Stefan Adegbola seems too nice to convince in his repentance: “if one good deed in all my life I did / I do repent it from my very soul”.
If the problem of the play is managing its aesthetic of excess – hands, heads, brothers, murders multiply – the directorial strategy here is of amplification rather than amputation. This produces some inventively absurdist moments. The Beckettian scene in which Marcus kills a fly he likens to Aaron takes place around the Andronicus kitchen table, with Marcus a pained and prissy Vladimir to Titus’s irascibly unpredictable Estragon. Titus greets Tamora’s pageant of Revenge, Murder and Rapine from a slit cut in a large cardboard box, which moves about the stage on his bare feet sticking out of the bottom. Absurdism gains traction from some nicely observed situational details. The honeymooners Saturninus and Tamora rise reluctantly to humour Titus’s plans for hunting, wearing full summer-in-the-Hamptons outdoor outfits, accessorized with dark glasses and takeaway coffee; Lavinia greets her brothers returned from the wars with real warmth and the inevitable selfies; Aaron’s malignity is invisible in plain sight when he takes on a variety of anonymous professional roles. But with a swimming pool, a portable operating theatre to remove Titus’s hand, a messenger on a bicycle in the recognizable turquoise livery of “Deliveroma” to bring takeaway pigeon to the palace, and uncommitted demands for money, paper, and childminding from the front rows of the stalls, the production loses confidence. Having the murdered brothers Quintus (David Burnett) and Martius (Tom Lorcan) help with the murder of their Gothic doppelgängers is clever (although it further denies Lavinia any agency), but the image of the dead taking their own revenge is blunted by their under-used, bloodstained presence on the fringes of other scenes. There are no moments of quiet, and busy staging often substitutes for confidence in the play’s language. Aaron over-explicates his first Marlovian soliloquy with heavy gestural emphasis; Marcus, silver-haired and sporting an incongruous range of leisurewear, is uncomfortable in the role of moral arbiter, fluffing his long Ovidian ekphrasis on the mutilated Lavinia; Lucius, the “turned forth”, delivers his final speech uncertainly under the vengeful eye of the murdered Alarbus: the play closes with the sense that it is all about to begin again.
Towards the end of the play, Aaron is brought as prisoner to Lucius, who promises to hang him along with his illegitimate child. As he fashions a miniature noose from his belt, Lucius hands the swaddled infant to a spectator in the front row of the stalls in a moment that directly implicates the audience in the savage play-world. On press night, this prompted general laughter. The spectator held the doll unnaturally high, not quite knowing what to do, awkwardly waiting to give it back; the production silenced the baby’s habitual cries so that it became a mere inanimate prop. Together they connived in what Henri Bergson, pondering the cruelty of comedy, called “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart”. It may well be that, as the production’s own publicity has it, this is a Titus Andronicus for our times. But if it is – in its ambivalent glorification of the gendered violence it enacts, the appreciation it garnered from the audience, and its inability to gain any distance from the play’s own assumptions – then God help us.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.241 Tuesday, 29 August 2017
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: August 27, 2017 at 11:38:41 AM EDT
Subject: From TLS – Review of SHAKESPEARE FOR FREEDOM
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/shakespeare-22/
From TLS JULY 5, 2017
Shakespeare
COLIN S. MACDONALD
Ewan Fernie
Why the plays matter
327pp. Cambridge University Press. £35.
On May 13, 1853, the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth was honoured at the London Tavern in a ceremony organized by the English playwright and radical journalist Douglas Jerrold. Kossuth was presented with the complete works of Shakespeare, enclosed in a case modelled on Shakespeare’s house. In his speech at the tavern, Kossuth recounted how he had learned English in an Austrian prison by reading Shakespeare. But Shakespeare taught him more than English: “I learnt something besides”, Kossuth said. “I learnt politics.”
Kossuth is one of several figures who exemplify a Shakespearean afterlife of radical politics – the subject of Ewan Fernie’s Shakespeare for Freedom. Such activist harnessing of Shakespeare in struggles for freedom and equality is not, for Fernie, appropriation, in the sense of manipulating the plays to speak to such issues. Rather, the politics of freedom are embedded in the plays: “Shakespeare’s plays manifest and model the struggle for freedom”. Fernie’s book seeks to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s forgotten revolutionary potential and to reclaim freedom from the “bad name” given to it by so-called neo-liberalism.
A crucial form of freedom for Fernie is “the freedom to be yourself”. At first glance, this doesn’t appear to be something in short supply today, where the cultivation of the self has taken on a religious fervour, as we pour forth memoirs and obsessively chronicle our personalities on Instagram. This isn’t what Fernie means, however, though narcissistic hyperindividualism is part of the darker side of freedom that he is determined to confront. Fernie constructs a Shakespearean vision of “Freetown” – the Prince in Romeo and Juliet refers to “old Freetown, our common judgement-place” – as a theoretical place invoked by the plays where the free flourishing of individuals is reserved not only for high-born protagonists, such as Romeo and Juliet, but also for the impoverished Apothecary forced to sell poison to eke out a living. It is a place where personal freedom and self-enrichment can coincide with political, communal freedom. As Hegel writes, “I am only truly free when the other is also free and is recognized by me as free”.
Hegel is an important figure for Fernie, especially his famous, and inspiring, description of Shakespeare’s characters as “free artists of their own selves”. He devotes a chapter to expand on Hegel’s analysis of Shakespeare, ultimately disagreeing with his conclusion that Shakespeare’s vision of freedom is entirely individual. This dialectic between personal and political freedom is the central tension of the book.
Fernie writes clearly and passionately, combining deep learning and theoretical sophistication with an intimate, colloquial style. While his definitions of freedom run the risk of being so general as to encompass everything, and some of his emissaries of Shakespearean freedom, such as John Moriarty and Ted Hughes in the final chapter, feel more like diversions than central examples of his argument, the book is ultimately able to reanimate a progressive political Shakespeare without relying on easy answers or obscuring the darker undercurrents of Shakespearean freedom.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.240 Tuesday, 29 August 2017
From: Elyse Martin <
Date: August 28, 2017 at 11:17:45 AM EDT
Subject: The Folger Institute Fall Faculty Weekend Seminar
Dear SHAKESPER subscribers,
The Folger Institute will be offering a fall faculty weekend seminar from 3-4 November:
Shakespeare’s Virtues: Ethics, Entertainment, and Education
Julia Reinhard Lupton
Faculty Weekend Seminar
Sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for Shakespeare Studies
Virtue belongs to ethics, where it harbors deep affinities with performance, whether in Aristotle’s emphasis on habit and practice, in the link between virtue and the virtual through ideas of latency and dynamism, or in the qualities of the virtuoso as an expert performer of multiple arts and knowledges. This two-day seminar will explore the connections among ethics, entertainment, and education, using Shakespeare’s works as both laboratory and studio. The powerful connections among moral philosophy, physical performance, and liberal education have much to teach us about what the arts and humanities have to offer to education today. The seminar will invite participants to consider the forms of Renaissance entertainment explored and practiced in Shakespeare’s plays in the context of a range of historical and modern discourses, including medical humanities, environmental theater, devised theater, and distributed and embodied cognition. The ultimate concern of the seminar is to address virtue as a switch point between popular performance, moral philosophy, and theories and practices of humanist education, considered historically and in the contemporary moment.
Director: Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent monographs are Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2005). She had edited several volumes, including Arden Critical Guide to Romeo and Juliet, Political Theology and Early Modernity (2012; with Graham Hammill) and Shakespeare and Hospitality (2016; with David Goldstein). Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life is forthcoming from the University of Chicago.
Schedule: Friday and Saturday, 3 – 4 November 2017
Apply: 5 September 2017 for admission and grants-in-aid.
Please contact the Folger Institute at
Best,
Elyse Martin
Program Assistant
Folger Institute
Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
Phone (202) 675-0333
@champs_elyse
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.239 Tuesday, 29 August 2017
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Subject: Latest Shakespeare Festivals and Plays List
Dear Subscribers,
Kristin Backert has just provided me the latest version of the Shakespeare Festivals and Plays.
It can be found here: https://shaksper.net/scholarly-resources/shakespeare-festivals-and-plays
Please contact Kristin about any corrections, additions, or suggestions:
I would publicly like to than Kristin for her valuable contributions to SHAKSPER. Here, Here!!!
Hardy